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That's completely up to the distribution to decide, there is nothing stopping them to distribute libstdc++5 forever, this is exaclty what Microsoft does to preserve backwards compatibility in Windows, they ship dlls from old versions of their SO until they consider it no longer makes sense to do so.

Plenty of things break even without soname change, though. Try running any older Linux game & seeing if it runs - Alpha Centauri, Uplink, etc, they'll all crash horribly due to incompatible changes in libraries which never bothered to bump their soname.

Can you give a concrete example? What change broke Alpha Centauri? I don't have that game so I can't try myself. But from my experience with blobs it's most likely a bundled lib that is causing the problem.

Can you give a concrete example? What change broke Alpha Centauri? I don't have that game so I can't try myself. But from my experience with blobs it's most likely a bundled lib that is causing the problem.

Nope. Incompatible breakage in Xlib. Talking to an X.org core developer, I have a workaround (XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1). But you need to know about it (now Phoronix is the only public record of this fix). Eventually you can badger a lot of these games into running, but it's hardly user-friendly

Nope. Incompatible breakage in Xlib. Talking to an X.org core developer, I have a workaround (XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1). But you need to know about it (now Phoronix is the only public record of this fix). Eventually you can badger a lot of these games into running, but it's hardly user-friendly

Oh yeah, the Composite extension incompatibilities... True, that probably could have been handled better. But still, it's technically not an ABI breakage, you can't solve an ABI breakage by disabling a feature.

Originally Posted by curaga

GCC 3.3 was released in 2003. If a binary game hasn't been patched since then, it likely wouldn't run on Vista or later Windowses either.

Some small nits:
1. it doesn't matter when GCC 3.3 was released, the game should have been released after GCC 3.4 (2004) to have a chance at using the new ABI
2. since the blob is supposed to run on distros that don't release that often (hint: Debian stable) most blobs will only switch to the new ABI 1 or 2 years later then its release, so expect just about any blob before 2005-2006 to still be using libstdc++5.

Originally Posted by directhex

Mmm, nope, most of the pre-2000 games on my shelf will still run on Windows 7. Let's take Quake 2 as an example - shipped in 1997, still runs out of the box fine.

I don't have much experience with old games on Windows 7, I only tried Diablo 2 and it stutters like hell when sound is enabled, so Windows is not perfect either.